Quotes

Here is a list of quotes I like or wanted to be able to recall. If I have any misattributions or you can help me when an unknown author, please reach out.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb June, 6 2023

“A lot of what we call work is noise.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb June, 6 2023

“A lot of what we call work is noise.”

Rorke Denver June, 6 2023

“Calm is contagious.”

Rorke Denver June, 6 2023

“Calm is contagious.”

Friday Night Lights June, 6 2023

“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

Friday Night Lights June, 6 2023

“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

Jocko Willink June, 6 2023

“Discipline equals freedom.”

Jocko Willink June, 6 2023

“Discipline equals freedom.”

Naval Ravikant June, 6 2023

“Freedom to, not freedom from.”

Naval Ravikant June, 6 2023

“Freedom to, not freedom from.”

Peter Apps June, 6 2023

“History isn’t over.”

Peter Apps June, 6 2023

“History isn’t over.”

Kevin Rose June, 6 2023

“Invest in the inevitable.”

Kevin Rose June, 6 2023

“Invest in the inevitable.”

John Mayer June, 6 2023

  1. “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can’t…That’s when I get writer’s block: when I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. I’ve never gotten a song that way. But if I write about something the size of a glass of water—a week later, I notice it’s got the universe in it. So I’d rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe.”

  2. ”What connects with people is you connecting with yourself.”

  3. “Writer’s block is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. It is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.”

  4. “Don’t shoot ideas down before you have them. ‘That won’t work’ is the worst thing you can ever say. ‘That didn’t work’ is cool, but ‘that won’t work’ is not a way to go through life.”

  5. “I’ve seen the Cool metric change so many times. I’m not telling you don’t chase Cool. I’m saying…by the time you reach what you think is cool, Cool is like, ‘over here now.’ ‘The princess is in another castle.’ You know what I mean? That’s a Mario reference.”

  6. ”I’m one-half consumer, one-half artist. So I try to put music out that I myself would want to hear as somebody on the other end.”

  7. ”I’m seeing a lot of motivation about you following your passion, but I’m not seeing any critical thought to what that is or how to be better at that. So, really the product is passion and that’s strange to me. Because my product growing up was sitting in a room yelling, ‘Mom, I’m practicing,’ for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.

  8. ”But then also read up…You know, this stuff doesn’t just appear. It comes from somewhere. And as soon as you realize you love something—it’s almost like catching up with some great TV show on season 9, and you can go, ‘oh my God, that means there’s 8 seasons before this.”

  9. ”Whatever you learn is the tip of the iceberg. Dive underwater and find the rest of the iceberg.”

  10. ”So listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan brought me back to people like Kenny Burrell and Albert King and Jimi Hendrix and Elmore James. So it became this family tree growing out of my CD player.”

  11. ”I came up with these guys as like references…It’s like if you’re into the NBA and you wear different jerseys and you pretend you’re a different player in the driveway—that’s what I was doing…”

  12. ”Which is a wonderful technique for being yourself. Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself.”

  13. After watching Cory Wong play guitar, Mayer told him, ”You have an anatomy thing working on your right hand. Your hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that you’re able to play like that. That is an example of someone making the most of their anatomical gifts… And I wish more people could embrace finding what their strengths are anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, whatever—and play to those strengths.”

  14. Mayer picks up an acoustic guitar and demonstrates his songwriting process. “Well, I don’t always do it, because it requires a stupid bravery all the time. You just stare at the corner of the wall, stare at the corner of the wall, try to get it going on, but I can’t sometimes, you just keep going ’til you get something. You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it…it doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth].”

John Mayer June, 6 2023

  1. “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can’t…That’s when I get writer’s block: when I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. I’ve never gotten a song that way. But if I write about something the size of a glass of water—a week later, I notice it’s got the universe in it. So I’d rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe.”

  2. ”What connects with people is you connecting with yourself.”

  3. “Writer’s block is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. It is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.”

  4. “Don’t shoot ideas down before you have them. ‘That won’t work’ is the worst thing you can ever say. ‘That didn’t work’ is cool, but ‘that won’t work’ is not a way to go through life.”

  5. “I’ve seen the Cool metric change so many times. I’m not telling you don’t chase Cool. I’m saying…by the time you reach what you think is cool, Cool is like, ‘over here now.’ ‘The princess is in another castle.’ You know what I mean? That’s a Mario reference.”

  6. ”I’m one-half consumer, one-half artist. So I try to put music out that I myself would want to hear as somebody on the other end.”

  7. ”I’m seeing a lot of motivation about you following your passion, but I’m not seeing any critical thought to what that is or how to be better at that. So, really the product is passion and that’s strange to me. Because my product growing up was sitting in a room yelling, ‘Mom, I’m practicing,’ for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.

  8. ”But then also read up…You know, this stuff doesn’t just appear. It comes from somewhere. And as soon as you realize you love something—it’s almost like catching up with some great TV show on season 9, and you can go, ‘oh my God, that means there’s 8 seasons before this.”

  9. ”Whatever you learn is the tip of the iceberg. Dive underwater and find the rest of the iceberg.”

  10. ”So listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan brought me back to people like Kenny Burrell and Albert King and Jimi Hendrix and Elmore James. So it became this family tree growing out of my CD player.”

  11. ”I came up with these guys as like references…It’s like if you’re into the NBA and you wear different jerseys and you pretend you’re a different player in the driveway—that’s what I was doing…”

  12. ”Which is a wonderful technique for being yourself. Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself.”

  13. After watching Cory Wong play guitar, Mayer told him, ”You have an anatomy thing working on your right hand. Your hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that you’re able to play like that. That is an example of someone making the most of their anatomical gifts… And I wish more people could embrace finding what their strengths are anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, whatever—and play to those strengths.”

  14. Mayer picks up an acoustic guitar and demonstrates his songwriting process. “Well, I don’t always do it, because it requires a stupid bravery all the time. You just stare at the corner of the wall, stare at the corner of the wall, try to get it going on, but I can’t sometimes, you just keep going ’til you get something. You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it…it doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth].”

None June, 6 2023

”Might as well”

None June, 6 2023

”Might as well”

Reddit June, 6 2023

”Punk rock made me woke.”

Reddit June, 6 2023

”Punk rock made me woke.”

David Foster Wallace June, 6 2023

“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

David Foster Wallace June, 6 2023

“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

Project Management Triangle June, 6 2023

”Good, on time, cheap — pick two.”

Project Management Triangle June, 6 2023

”Good, on time, cheap — pick two.”

SEALS June, 6 2023

”It pays to be a winner.”

Alan Watts June, 6 2023

”Now in this process, another thing that is happening that is very important…

Is that you’re breathing.

And as you start meditation, you allow your breath to run — just as it wills. In other words, don’t do, at first, any breathing exercise. But just watch your breath breathing the way it wants to breathe. And then notice a curious thing about this. You say in the ordinary way, “I breathe.” Because you feel that breathing is something that you are doing voluntarily. Just in the same way as you might be walking or talking. But you will also notice that when you are not thinking about breathing, your breathing goes on just the same.

So the curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action. You can feel on the one hand, “I am doing it” and on the other hand, “It is happening to me.” And that is why breathing is a most important part of meditation. Because it is going to show you, as you become aware of your breath, that the hard and fast division that we make between what we do, on the one hand, and what happens to us on the other, is arbitrary. So that as you watch your breathing, you will become aware, that both the voluntary and the involuntary aspects of your experience are all one happening.

Now that may, at first, seem a little scary. Because you may think, ‘Well am I just the puppet of a happening? The mere passive witness of something that’s going on completely beyond my control?’ Or on the other hand, ‘Am I really doing everything that’s going along? Well if I were, I should be God. And that would be very embarrassing because I would be in charge of everything. That would be a terribly responsible position.’

The truth of the matter, as you will see it, is that both things are true. You conceed that everything is happening to you. And on the other hand you are doing everything.

For example, it’s your eyes that are turning the sun into light. It’s the nerve ends in your skin that are turning electric vibrations in the air into heat and temperature. It’s your ear drums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound.

And in that way you are creating the world.

But — when we’re not talking about it, when we’re not philosophizing about it, then there is just this happening, this…

And we won’t give it a name.”

Alan Watts June, 6 2023

”Now in this process, another thing that is happening that is very important…

Is that you’re breathing.

And as you start meditation, you allow your breath to run — just as it wills. In other words, don’t do, at first, any breathing exercise. But just watch your breath breathing the way it wants to breathe. And then notice a curious thing about this. You say in the ordinary way, “I breathe.” Because you feel that breathing is something that you are doing voluntarily. Just in the same way as you might be walking or talking. But you will also notice that when you are not thinking about breathing, your breathing goes on just the same.

So the curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action. You can feel on the one hand, “I am doing it” and on the other hand, “It is happening to me.” And that is why breathing is a most important part of meditation. Because it is going to show you, as you become aware of your breath, that the hard and fast division that we make between what we do, on the one hand, and what happens to us on the other, is arbitrary. So that as you watch your breathing, you will become aware, that both the voluntary and the involuntary aspects of your experience are all one happening.

Now that may, at first, seem a little scary. Because you may think, ‘Well am I just the puppet of a happening? The mere passive witness of something that’s going on completely beyond my control?’ Or on the other hand, ‘Am I really doing everything that’s going along? Well if I were, I should be God. And that would be very embarrassing because I would be in charge of everything. That would be a terribly responsible position.’

The truth of the matter, as you will see it, is that both things are true. You conceed that everything is happening to you. And on the other hand you are doing everything.

For example, it’s your eyes that are turning the sun into light. It’s the nerve ends in your skin that are turning electric vibrations in the air into heat and temperature. It’s your ear drums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound.

And in that way you are creating the world.

But — when we’re not talking about it, when we’re not philosophizing about it, then there is just this happening, this…

And we won’t give it a name.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. June, 6 2023

”The young know the rules. The old know the exceptions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. June, 6 2023

”The young know the rules. The old know the exceptions.”

Eric Thomas June, 6 2023

”There was a young man that wanted to make a lot of money, right? So he went to this guru and told him, ”I want to be on the same level that you’re on.”

The guru told him, ”If you want to be on the same level I’m on, I’ll meet you tomorrow at the beach.”

So the young man got there at 4 A.M, all ready to rock and roll, got on a suit when he shoulda wore shorts. The old man grabs his hand and says, ”How bad do you want to be successful?”

He said, ”Real bad.”

The old man says, ”Walk on out into the water.”

So he walks on out into the water, waist deep. So, to himself, he’s like, ”This guy is crazy.”

He’s thinkin', ”I wanna make money, he’s got me out here swimming. I don’t want to be a life guard, I want to make money.”

The old man says, ”Come out a little further.”

He walked out a little further, out to his shoulder area. He’s thinking, ”This old man is crazy, he’s makin' money but he’s crazy.”

The old man says, ”Come out a little further.”

He came out a little further, it’s right at his mouth and he’s thinking, ”I’m about to go right back, this guys out of his mind.”

So the old man said, ”I thought you wanted to be successful?”

He said, ”I do!”

The old man said, ”Walk a little further.”

He did, he walked a little further. The old man grabbed his head, under water, held him down, the guy was kickin' and scratchin', still holding him down, he had him held down and just before he was about to pass out the old man raised him up.

”When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breath, then you’ll be successful.”

Eric Thomas June, 6 2023

”There was a young man that wanted to make a lot of money, right? So he went to this guru and told him, ”I want to be on the same level that you’re on.”

The guru told him, ”If you want to be on the same level I’m on, I’ll meet you tomorrow at the beach.”

So the young man got there at 4 A.M, all ready to rock and roll, got on a suit when he shoulda wore shorts. The old man grabs his hand and says, ”How bad do you want to be successful?”

He said, ”Real bad.”

The old man says, ”Walk on out into the water.”

So he walks on out into the water, waist deep. So, to himself, he’s like, ”This guy is crazy.”

He’s thinkin', ”I wanna make money, he’s got me out here swimming. I don’t want to be a life guard, I want to make money.”

The old man says, ”Come out a little further.”

He walked out a little further, out to his shoulder area. He’s thinking, ”This old man is crazy, he’s makin' money but he’s crazy.”

The old man says, ”Come out a little further.”

He came out a little further, it’s right at his mouth and he’s thinking, ”I’m about to go right back, this guys out of his mind.”

So the old man said, ”I thought you wanted to be successful?”

He said, ”I do!”

The old man said, ”Walk a little further.”

He did, he walked a little further. The old man grabbed his head, under water, held him down, the guy was kickin' and scratchin', still holding him down, he had him held down and just before he was about to pass out the old man raised him up.

”When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breath, then you’ll be successful.”

Reddit June, 6 2023

”Today you…tomorrow me.”

Reddit June, 6 2023

”Today you…tomorrow me.”

Unknown June, 6 2023

”Work smarter, not harder.”

Unknown June, 6 2023

”Work smarter, not harder.”